Journalist, Author & Syndicated Columnist
“It’s my dream to travel around the world and play with local musicians playing their traditional instruments,” Suga says in his documentary Suga: Road to D-Day. “It’s my dream to record them and make music based on that.” But he has trepidation, too. “I worry that I won’t have anything to talk about,” Suga says. “I have fears that I have no more dreams to follow.”
“j-hope IN THE BOX” is told in a non linear way, starting in Seoul 52 days before j-hope’s performance at Lollapalooza, where he made history as the festival’s first Korean headliner — a feat that even he found surprising. The lead up to the concert — which fans dubbed Hobipalooza — depicts the pain the rapper took to ensure that his debut as BTS’ first solo artist would be nothing short of perfection.
In an unusual cinematic coincidence, two critically acclaimed films about South Korean adoption were released in December depicting different sides of the adoption story. Broker focuses on a teenage girl who leaves her infant at a church’s safe haven baby box, while Return to Seoul tells the story of a French woman who reunites with her birth family just days after arriving in Korea. To better understand how these films speak to real-life adoptees, I talked to Korean academics, human rights experts, and adoptees. My reported piece for MASHABLE.
“Midnight” is a fast-paced thriller that hits all the jump scares: A mother and daughter who cannot hear or speak are stalked by an insatiable serial killer. The film is a testament to the strength of the powerless and their will to survive.
In the superb “Return to Seoul” – which is Cambodia’s Oscar entry for the Best International Film category – French Cambodian filmmaker Davy Chou (“Golden Slumbers”) takes a look at what it means to be an adoptee who unexpectedly is reunited with her birth parents.
“The Dude In Me” is a 2019 Korean fantasy film that centers on a high-ranking gangster and a high school student. When the latter accidentally falls from his school roof, he lands on the mobster. While neither dies, the mishap somehow switches the pair’s bodies and minds. Now, wiseguy Pan-soo is trapped in the body of chubby and bullied teenager Dong-hyun, while Dong-hyun is stuck in Pan-soo’s comatose body.
For many Westerners, Korean cinema didn’t enter their consciousness until the unparalleled success of the film “Parasite: in 2019. The gripping film deals with socio-economic discrepancies specific to modern-day South Korea, but the clever and sometimes brutal storyline hit a nerve with filmgoers worldwide. The film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, an Oscar for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, and a BAFTA for Best Film Not in the English Language at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.
“Seoul Vibe” is full of backstabbing, murder and mayhem. Director Moon Hyun-sung does a commendable job at keeping the plot moving, but he knows that the wild car chases are the key to this movie.
In the span of time it takes for a plane to fly from Seoul to Honolulu — approximately nine hours — a psychopath boards an airplane at Incheon International Airport and releases a deadly biological pathogen onboard, which results in passengers getting sick and/or dying (and turning on each other). And, oh yeah, scientists on the ground develop an antigen to combat the virus.
